Friday, October 19th, 2012

Beginning Kindergarten for Jonas, Preschool for Ronan

One of the challenges of teaching two young children of different ages at home is keeping them both interested and learning, but teaching them at their own level. Jonas is ready to read while Ronan is just beginning to write and recognize his letters. Jonas knows his numbers and basic addition and subtraction while Ronan is just beginning to catch these concepts on his fingers.

Vacation time is now over and our vacation was much longer than most as we took a whole month in Peru at the beginning of the school year. This was by no means wasted learning time. Both children learned a lot of Spanish, visited some very important parks (Attacama Desert, Islas Ballestas from Paracas...) and ruins of ancient Incan culture (Machu Picchu), and were exposed to differences in culture which we will begin to explore in these first couple of weeks of being home.

This week in schooling we are beginning to create our pattern. At the beginning of the week we were still recovering from our trip. Therefore Monday and Tuesday were basically days off. On Tuesday however the kids had a riding lesson with Ms. Monica and loved it. Afterwards they helped Ms. Tiana clean out a stall for one of the horses while mama finished cleaning a different stall.

Wednesday we came home from the gym to begin our lessons in front of the white board. We learned how to write today's date and where on our paper we should put our name and the date. We talked about the three parts to writing the date (month, day, year). Jonas and Ronan both wrote October 17th, 2012 (I helped Ronan with the numbers) and their names in their notebooks. After name and date we moved on to beginning some word recognition. We talked about the words 'a' and 'and.' Jonas and I created a sentence with each word and Jonas wrote them in his notebook. Ronan practiced writing A's and his name. They both earned 5 stars (written every day on the whiteboard) and earned apple pie.

Thursday we began our lesson with a scavenger hunt. I wrote up 5 clues of short rhymes and they followed the clues to find stickers and temporary tattoos. After the hunt we sat down by the whiteboard and reviewed writing the date by getting our new page ready with the new date. Then we talked about the sounds 'th' and 'sh.' Jonas and I came up with 4 words for each sound and he wrote them in his book. Ronan practiced writing 'L's and 'I's in his book (and made their sounds). After sounds we talked about different kinds of lines (vertical, horizontal, squiggly, zigzag,...) and how these can be used to make shapes. Each child was asked to create a self portrait in lines. They both earned 5 stars again and we put the tattoos on their arms.

 Today we began again with a scavenger hunt. This time they requested it to be longer so I hid nearly 10 clues leading them to today's lesson, several Halloween activity sheets. Ronan practiced the concepts of more and less, bigger and smaller, and decided his favorite thing about Halloween was black cats (he wrote 'black cats' and drew a picture of a robot black cat). Jonas connected groups of spiders to their written numbers, practiced writing today's date and his name on all of his pages, wrote 'My favorite thing about Halloween is dressing up' and connected pictures to their beginning sounds.

Looking back I think I missed a good opportunity this week to go over rhyming. But since scavenger hunts were such a big hit perhaps we can go over that this weekend. We continue to do math time at bedtime however, I look forward to adding math lessons into our sit-down time in front of the whiteboard also. As I plan out our next week I will begin to create a better balance of subjects including science, geography, music. This weekend I will work on a schedule of subjects to keep this balance.

As I am slightly at a loss as to how to properly teach reading and writing a teacher friend of mine has offered me curriculum resources for teaching/learning and documenting these processes. I look forward to beginning Jonas' lessons in reading this next week. Ronan will begin "Handwriting Without Tears" as well and Jonas will probably end up reviewing this although his handwriting is very nice when he focuses. I will start Jonas on cursive letters as well.

This weekend we will focus on outdoor time when available and observation/question learning.
Next update will be on Friday, October 26th, 2012.